I am, as usual, watching the sky, towards the end of the evening.
The wind blows strong from the East and makes her way into our camp, surprised almost every time we are in a different place. The our lives inevitably follows the day, our heartbeats slow down gradually as the sun fades back to our accommodation to weary head traveling along roads SPERSE in large tracts of uncultivated fields. This time we stopped our steps a little 'longer, here in this camp where the elderly built some time ago an artesian well and then the civilians turned into cement and toilets. Children run, play and piss, splashing about in those lakes yellow inassorbiti from the earth covered with tar. I do not happened, we were free, as our fields were there for centuries, made of earth and fire. And our people are living in poverty and on luck. The past often envelops my thoughts and turns them into memories that make me heart beat fast.
When he died, my father gave me the necklace she always wore, a string of family, with a pendant shaped like a bull. Everyone we encounter in our travels, of any caste, you know who I am. The race is generous in its meaning: I can drink and eat with everyone, I offer accommodation. Sometimes I think, and always, when I look at the sky, that every cloud, every river ford, every leaf that falls, every dust trampled recognize me and my kind regards. All this smacks of old, brings with it the testimony of generations of the same gypsy blood, people from nations where magic and mystery blend into the need for survival, where the bread has the same value a necklace shaped like a bull for a reason for living right, freedom, dignity in all its sacredness, as part of life.
I still remember when I watched amazed as a child my grandmother's wrinkles, his veins on the temples so pronounced, her big lips, his hands felt so rough when he took my life to teach me the secrets hidden in the folds nature of our skin. Or to warn me to be careful with every element of nature: water, earth, fire and air, each taking and giving, demands respect, fear, understanding, particularly in those messages, changing, hidden from the history of Earth. I have the image of my own grandmother, a peek what's left of his life before a plastic window, admiring an outside world that does not belong to him anymore.
My grandfather he died in Poland during the persecution, they took him and shot him hanging upside down along with thirty other Gypsies in the countryside, so that we could all see. We were forced to flee away, first in Hungary, then in Yugoslavia until you arrive in Italy. I will never forget the tears of my grandmother in front of that horror, or the tears of my father when we burned the entire camp near Danzig, and even tears of my mother that night around a bonfire to remember and finally to cry of relief, under the shadows of our rides now tired and obsolete.
And today is a day of begging. The girls bring to the outskirts of the city to beg for some change. Sometimes the signs are back with him, with the beatings of civilians. We are told that they were beaten, so, for hatred, insult - Thieves! Go down and tell your parents that if they steal again, this time we give him fire! -.
But who has the right to judge our people, our customs, our lives? The case governs every aspect, every thought, every people and every person assigned to it.
Our eyes are turned to God alone gypsies Like now, I watch the sky get dark, and I feel out of our women light the fire, singing our song oldest:
- lay his head on your shoulder and will
a dream of sea
tomorrow and a wood fire
because the air blue
become home.
Who will tell who will
will be those who remain, I will follow this
migrate
follow this line of wings -
This story is inspired by the song "Khorakhané (in The Wind)" by F. De André - I. Fossati (Edizioni Music: The Flying Ltd, Clouds sas, BMG Ricordi SpA) to which a party is the translation given here at the end of the story, taken from the book "Fabrizio De André - the tests and the scores of all the songs" published by the publishing house Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA in the series "SuperM.
